BIOIBÉRICA

The Release of the First Documentary Dedicated to Heparin: a Centenary Drug That Saves over One Hundred Million Lives Each Year

“Everybody has heard of penicillin, but nobody knows what heparin is.
And the fact is that heparin has saved as many lives as penicillin in
the course of the 20th century
”, explains Prof.
Coen Hemker
, a biochemist and Emeritus of the University of
Maastricht, at the start of the documentary “Heparin: 100 years
saving lives”
. This 30-minute audiovisual recording has been
directed by Carles
Canet
and produced by Broadcaster
,
with promotion from Bioibérica
,
to describe – on the basis of personal experiences – this anticoagulant
drug which is so important in modern Medicine, having been declared a
first-need drug by the World Health Organization.

But the true central characters of this documentary are the patients who
explain their own experiences: “I found it impossible to finish a
training session and couldn’t believe that I would have to abandon water
polo because of a clot in the subclavian vein at 17 years of age. Thanks
to heparin, I was able to recover after six months, and everything that
came afterwards was very much worthwhile”,
explains Jennifer
Pareja
, a Spanish water polo player nominated the best player in the
world in 2013.

The documentary can be seen online on Bioiberica
website
and is open to all those entities, educational institutions,
organizations and people who wish to use and diffuse the recording. “Five
out of every 10 people will need heparin at some point in life. Medicine
wouldn’t be where it is today without it
”, explains Professor
James Marcum
, a historian at Baylor University in the United States.

Heparin
, discovered in 1916, is a highly sulfated
glycosaminoglycan – a natural substance composed of various molecules
that inhibits blood clotting. Because of these properties, heparin is
currently the most widely used drug for preventing and treating
thrombosis. According to the International
Society on Thrombosis and Hemostasis
, one out of every four
people in the world die of causes related to this disorder
, which
now produces more deaths each year than AIDS, breast cancer and traffic
accidents combined.